Monday, 17 November 2014

The whole woman

The whole Germaine, 1971

I have a lot of time for Germaine Greer. The Australian
author and academic, long resident in England, is always worth reading and
often worth hearing. I confess I prefer the solid scholarship of her work on
art and literature to the polemical rapier thrusts of her feminism, but for the
reader there’s something to be got from everything she publishes, even if it’s
a just a sense of outrage.

Her views on transsexualism are a case in point. Nearly
thirty years after The Female Eunuch,
she reluctantly brought out a sequel, The
Whole Woman, “the book I said I would never write” (p1). She sees little
advance in the interim: yes, the equality agenda has been pursued with great
success, but at the expense of the liberation that was promised in the very
name of ‘Women’s Liberation’. One
chapter of the later volume is devoted to transsexuals, and it’s clear from the
chapter title that they (and we) are in for a rough ride. ‘Pantomime Dames’,
she calls them (or us). The ‘liberation’ she hoped for in the 1970s was not the
freedom for biological males to declare themselves female and, supported by the
law, to insist on being admitted to the XX club. Greer expresses her
transphobia with characteristic energy:

Governments that consist of very
few women have hurried to recognise as women men who believe that they are women
and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as
another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a
uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made
mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that
manmade women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the
mistaken conviction that women are defective males. The biological truth is the
opposite; all biologists know that males are defective females… (pp64-5)

How does one begin to unpack that passage? First of all, I’m
not sure whether a “uterus-and-ovaries transplant” into a male body is even
technically possible. But there might
be volunteers, if it were. Certainly, one of the categories documented by
Blanchard among his patients is what he called ‘physiologic autogynephilia’ –
sexual arousal to the thought of menstruation, pregnancy or lactation. Magnus
Hirschfeld, the pioneer in this field, described in 1918 a case of what he called
‘pregnancy transvestism’, and later researchers report the prevalence of
fantasies (not necessarily erotic ones) involving pregnancy and menstruation in
small samples of MtF transsexuals and heterosexual crossdressers.

What baffles me is how she gets from there to her next
proposition: that MtF gender reassignment is “the institutional expression of
the mistaken conviction that women are defective males”. This is, of course, a
belief with a long ancestry stretching back to the Greeks. The foundation of
Galenic anatomy, which came under challenge from the Renaissance onwards, was
that we all begin as female, and masculinity is a happy development out of and
away from femininity; the female was seen as an incomplete male whose genitals
were simply male genitals inverted and carried internally rather than
externally. But I fail to see, in the twenty-first century West, any continuing
“institutional expression” of such fallacies.

Like many crossdreamers’, my sense of self is quite the
opposite. If we’re constructing hierarchies (and perhaps we shouldn’t?) then femaleness
is at the top of it, the desired condition, at once a ‘higher’ state and a ‘deeper’
state than maleness. Yet ‘gender identity’, understood as a person’s inner
conviction of being male or female, seems to play no part in Greer’s scheme unless it is consonant with their genitalia: “chromosomal
sex” (p69) alone entitles a person to be called female, and no dosage of
hormones or surgical procedure can relieve gender dysphoria, a “disease” with “no
biological marker” (p64) for whose sufferers she plainly feels little sympathy.

Later in the chapter, after what feels like a lengthy digression
about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (a condition in which the male foetus doesn’t
respond to androgens and fails to develop masculine characteristics), Greer turns
her fire on the sisterhood:

A good-hearted woman is not
supposed to mind that her sex is the catch-all for all cases of gender
ambiguity, but her tolerance of spurious femaleness, her consent to treat it as
if it is the same as her own gender identity weakens her claim to have a sex of
her own and tacitly supports the Freudian stereotype of women as incomplete
beings defined by their lack of a penis. Women’s lack of choosiness about who
may be called a woman strengthens the impression that women do not see their
sex as quite real, and suggests that they too identify themselves as the
not-male, the other, any other… (p73)

I have to say I have never in my life encountered a woman
who viewed her sex as “not quite real”. The palpable sense of groundedness in their
own physical sex is one of the qualities I most envy in cis women. Even if I
were to transition, I could never hope to approximate that level of reality.

In a final twist in an argument that was never an argument
but only a provocation, Greer contends that the transsexual makes an enemy of
his/her mother:

Whatever else it is gender
reassignment is an exorcism of the mother. When a man decides to spend his life
impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it, proving
at a stroke that there was nothing to her. His intentions are no more
honourable than any female impersonator’s; his achievement is to gag all those
who would call his bluff… (p74)

The casual confusion of crossdressing and transsexuality
betrayed by the Hitchcock reference shows how little thought she has given to
this issue. The suffering that some TS people endure in coming out to parents
here counts for nothing.

Rachael Padman

It’s a curious fact that Greer’s insistence on viewing trans
women as simply men-with-a-problem places her in the same camp as the reviled
Professor Blanchard. If these two individuals were ever to dine at the same table,
would they find common cause on anything else? Her views have already lost her
friends in academia. When teaching at Cambridge in the 1990s, Greer
unsuccessfully opposed the election to a fellowship of the transsexual
physicist Rachael Padman. Greer argued that Padman had been born male, and
therefore should not be admitted to Newnham, a women’s college whose statutes
only permit the election of female fellows. Greer resigned from the college’s
governing body in 1996 after the case attracted negative publicity. While some
transsexual activists contend that no distinction should be made between cis
women and trans women, Padman herself believes it is important to be “realistic”
and accept there are differences. As she said later in a newspaper interview: “It
doesn’t matter how empathetic you are before or during transition or how well
you are accepted, you have not been born or brought up as a woman and that
inevitably makes a difference.”

We transgenderists of every stripe can never be ‘the whole
woman’ – but “men who believe that they are women” (p64) are not the deluded
pawns in some patriarchal power-game. And we are emphatically not “pantomime
dames”.